".....The Alternate Anatomies Lab is an interdisciplinary lab that interrogates the aesthetics, the ethics and the engineering of prosthetics, robotics and virtual systems. Its interest encompasses the post-modern condition, post-humanism, identity, embodiment and the evoking of agency in machine systems. Thus it creatively incorporates biomechanics and biomimicry in exploring aliveness with robots. AAL aims to generate concepts of the future that can be contested, critically examined and possibly appropriated."

"Google Ventures’ President Bill Maris, who helps direct investments into health and science companies, recently made headlines by tellingBloomberg, “If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes.”

As a transhumanist, my number one goal has always been to use science and technology to live in optimum health indefinitely. Until the last few years, this idea was seen mostly as something fringe. But now with the business community getting involved and supporting longevity science, this attitude is inevitably going to go mainstream.

I am thrilled with this. Business has always spurred new industry and quickened the rise of civilization.

However, significant challenges remain. The million dollar question is: How are we going to overcome death? It’s a great question—and it’s a very common question transhumanists get asked. It’s usually followed by: And is it really possible to overcome death?"

"Peter just joined the growing network of biohackers that are curious to find out how we can combine technology with biology. What to do with NFC in your hand? That's like the same question you ask when you ask: 'What to do with a ac/dc-socket?' It depends which kind of device you plug in. Endless possibilities like storing Bitcoins in your body or opening an NFC-enabled door :)

This chip is developed by Amal Graafstra. The guy that helped Peter is Tom van Oudenaarde, a piercing artist who is experienced with implanting stuff under your skinn. Always aks this kind of experts to help and never try it yourself :)"

"McCauley is a hacker at heart and has no qualms about experimenting on himself to prove a point. So, in the middle of his talk, he called piercing professional Tom van Oudenaarde onstage and announced he’d be implanting a chip in his hand.

Was he nervous? A little. But by all accounts the procedure was quick and relatively painless. In fact, so much so that Singularity University cofounder, Peter Diamandis, walked onstage an hour later and got chipped too.

The chip—a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag encased in a biocompatible glass cylinder the size of a grain of rice—was implanted in a three-minute procedure, start to finish, and left a small puncture wound and a bit of soreness.

To be clear, neither the technology nor the procedure is particularly novel. Vets have been implanting pets and livestock with RFID chips for a couple decades, and human RFID implants have been happening since at least the mid-2000s.

So, why get one? According to Diamandis, it was a spur-of-the-moment experiment to see how he’d feel having a piece of technology in his body. But he thinks that implantables, in general, could offer much more.

“In all honesty, I think biohacking, the cyborg human, is an eventuality that will materialize when the value proposition gets high enough,” Diamandis wrote in a recent blog post about his new implant.

RFID chips are passive bits of hardware powered and activated when near an RFID reader. Most people have experienced them at one time or another—cards granting access to an office or onto the subway or a bus.

Diamandis suggests near-term uses of RFID implants might be smooth interaction with the Internet of Things. We could use our hands to unlock doors, start the car, and pay for coffee. McCauley says we might keep contact information on our chip, swap said information by shaking hands—like an embedded business card.

Some of these applications are still in the future. The number of connected devices in our everyday lives are yet minimal enough that most of us wouldn’t get much use out of an embedded chip. And whether embedding it would be an improvement on keeping it somewhere outside our bodies, like on a card or in our phone, is an open question.

That said, the number of devices we might control with an implant is set to grow in the coming years. And the truly compelling “value proposition” may lie elsewhere—in health and medicine."

"Remember, Google introduced Calico to the world with the bold ambition of "curing death." CEO Larry Page, Google Ventures head honcho Bill Maris, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who Google hired as its director of engineering, have all expressed a deep interest in radical life extension and the Singularity. Up until today we haven't had a lot of detail about how Calico would pursue that goal. Page had told Time, "One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.""

0:05:04 The Panopticon0:09:51 If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear0:13:12 Surveillance and the unequal relationship of power0:15:24 Defining the technology, Lewis Mumford0:16:34 Democratic and authoritarian technic0:21:52 The computer is an authoritarian technic0:25:10 Abusive culture, the abusive mindset0:26:26 This culture is completely insane0:32:54 Science and domination0:37:12 R.D. Laing and the three rules, the hierarchy0:39:27 Why we don't talk about this culture destroying the planet0:43:14 The Congo and why0:46:23 Technological deus ex machina: Transhumanism and solar panels0:54:02 You fight for what is important to you0:55:14 The 'logic' of the system0:59:03 Back to deus ex machina1:01:52 Solar panels: Who benefits and who is harmed?1:05:47 Personal change does not equal political change

"Google is on a shopping spree, buying startup after startup to push its business into the future. But these companies don’t run web services or sell ads or build smartphone software or dabble in other things that Google is best known for. The web’s most powerful company is filling its shopping cart with artificial intelligence algorithms, robots, and smart gadgets for the home. It’s on a mission to build an enormous digital brain that operates as much like the human mind as possible — and, in many ways, even better.

Yesterday, Google confirmed that it has purchased a stealthy artificial intelligence startup calledDeepMind. According to reports, the company paid somewhere in the mid-hundreds of millions of dollars for the British outfit. Though Google didn’t discuss the price tag, that enormous figure is in line with the rest of its recent activity.

Lifelike robots, sentient machines, the Jetsons’ smart home in the sky. Google is spending billions to make itself the place where these fantasies become facts.

Google is looking to spread smart computer hardware into so many parts of our everyday lives — from our homes and our cars to our bodies — but perhaps more importantly, it’s developing a new type of artificial intelligence that can help operate these devices, as well as its many existing web and smartphone services.

Though Google is out in front of this AI arms race, others are moving in the same direction. Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are doubling down on artificial intelligence too, and are snapping up fresh AI talent. According to The Information, Mark Zuckerberg and company were also trying to acquire DeepMind."

When I was doing my PhD, more than ten years ago now, I remember coming across a peer reviewed article which had a drawing of a PDA (personal digital assistant) positioned graphically "in" the upper arm (just below the shoulder). The PDA was supposed to be embedded, just like this temperature sensor with bluetooth capability.

I would suggest for anyone thinking this is "awesome" that they take a good long read of the following article:

"....Hi! We're Amanda and Ville from Sweden. We got the mission to find out what lifelogging is. So we went on a trip around the world and met with people on the forefront of the lifelogging trend. People like Thad Sterner who's working with Google Glasses and Gordon Bell who is a researcher at Microsoft and Steve Mann who is the founding father of the whole lifelogging movement. We filmed the whole trip and the material will be edited into a documentary premiering later this winter. Stay tuned, and follow us on blog.memoto.com!"

War changes everything. War is an apocalypse and a technological revolution and a life-changing adventure, all rolled into one. So it's not surprising that many of science fiction's most indelible stories are about warfare.

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky* wrote about an experiment which had to do with Artificial Inteligence. In a near future, man will have given birth to machines that are able to rewrite their codes, to improve themselves, and, why not, to dispense with them. This idea sounded a little bit distant to some critic voices, so an experiment was to be done: keep the AI sealed in a box from which it could not get out except by one mean: convincing a human guardian to let it out.

What if, as Yudkowsky states, ‘Humans are not secure’? Could we chess match our best creation to grant our own survival? Would man be humble enough to accept he was superseded, to look for primitive ways to find himself back, to cure himself from a disease that’s on his own genes? How to capture a force we voluntarily set free? What if mankind worst enemy were humans?